Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (66 page)

I tried the door of the balcony I was on. Locked. I went down another level, my panic mounting again. Also locked. Down one more. Here the door moved under my hand. I slid it open just a fraction of an inch and paused to look inside. A middle-aged woman stood in the kitchen in full sight of the balcony, cooking something. Brewing tea. I waited. Please hurry.

Finally, when she had filled her mug and walked, ever so slowly, out of the kitchen, across the living room, and into the bedroom, I inched the door carefully open and slipped through. I pushed it shut again behind me and latched it, hoping that would make it more difficult for them to figure out where I had gone.

I crossed to the entrance door and paused. I could hear water running. I pulled open the front door, which emitted a piercing creak.

“Hello?” the woman called out.

Slip through and pull the door shut again. Nothing to do about the noise.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

I ran down the hall and into the first fire stair. I thundered down it as fast as I could, five, six, seven stories, three and four stairs at a time.

Somewhere below I heard a door open, and voices. I slowed up abruptly, still proceeding toward them frantically, two stairs at a time, but carefully now, quietly, holding onto the railing so that I would not stumble and betray myself.

“How many of these stairs are there?”

“Just the two.”

“… main entrance on the avenue and the service entrance from the basement to the side street…”

Two flights from the bottom, I caught sight of part of Clellan’s face below. I stopped altogether for a moment and then crept forward. Tyler was there too, and someone else.

“Why don’t they lock?”

“They’re fire exits…”

“Well get some armed men in from the street and put one on each of these doors right away. On the second floor too. We should have both floors evacuated within a few minutes. If he tries to leave the building, he’s got to do it from either the first or second floor. I want to see the other stairway…”

I slipped out through the fire door and into the lobby right behind them. At the other end of the lobby I found Jenkins and Gomez. Gomez was letting people out through a revolving door, one at a time.

A policeman was calling up residents on the housephone: “This is the police. We have to evacuate the building. Don’t open your door until police officers come to escort you from the building… That’s right, we got an armed fugitive.”

Jenkins was talking into a radio. “How many men have you got outside? … All right, if you can bring up more… Make sure they’re ready to shoot at anything unusual… Watch especially the second floor windows…”

That made sense. The service entrance was hopeless, and there were no apartments on the ground floor. Maybe the third floor, but it was so high above the pavement. I walked back across the lobby. Through the large windows of plate glass that ran from floor to ceiling I could see police cars everywhere and uniformed men wearing bulletproof vests and holding rifles. They were staring up at the second floor. The situation was only going to get worse.

I walked up to a light, upholstered armchair with wooden legs. I leaned over and shoved my hands into the crevices between the sidearms and the seat, which bent my fingers back the wrong way but gave me a good grip. Hunching forward with my head down, I tilted the chair toward me and heaved it up so that the back rested on my head and shoulders and the four legs pointed ahead like the horns of a charging animal.

I heard a shout, then more shouting. I was running full tilt straight at the plate glass window for an endless, excruciating moment. Unable to see anything with the chair over my head, I could not tell exactly when the collision would occur, and I had no idea whether I was strong enough to smash through.

When I hit, there seemed to be an explosion all around me. I felt something brushing against my legs, and there was a dense shower of broken bits of glass. I heaved the chair forward off my shoulders and free of my hands and immediately scrambled off to one side. I heard guns firing everywhere and wondered whether I was being hit as I ran down the sidewalk and then scurried between parked cars into the middle of the street.

“Where is he?”

“He never came out.”

“He’s under the chair. We got him!”

“I never saw him.”

Despite the earliness of the hour, a crowd had gathered across the street. There were faces at the windows of the surrounding buildings.

“Move those people back, God damn it! He’s still in the building!”

“Is it one guy, or what? How many people we dealing with?”

I stood in the middle of the street, panting, and watched. Morrissey and Tyler were moving the police back from the building. Morrissey had a long, thin metal cane of the kind blind people use, which he was sweeping back and forth over the sidewalk in front of the shattered window. Tyler was down on his knees feeling the pavement with his hands. He looked up as Clellan approached.

“Blood, maybe.”

“A lot?” asked Clellan. Hopefully, I suppose.

Tyler shook his head. “Not here, but that doesn’t mean much. He must have been moving pretty fast.”

Clellan looked at Morrissey, who had reached one corner and was doubling back to work his way to the other.

“Look’s like he’s still moving,” said Clellan morosely.

I was about to leave when I saw two men come out of the building carrying a stretcher. Someone must have been hit by the gunfire. But then I saw — they had left her face and bright hair uncovered — that it was Alice they were carrying. Alice! I was in a frenzy, unable to think any clear thought, aware only of wanting desperately to get her away from these people. Was she alive? This was all my fault. I discovered that I was running toward the stretcher, which, for some reason, they were holding in front of the open door of an ambulance.

Then I saw that Gomez was standing several paces away, his eyes moving warily. He was holding a gun. Further off and to the other side, Jenkins stood watching with his right hand in his pocket. The stretcher bearers continued to stand motionless, as if exhibiting their load for public inspection. The peculiarity of it stopped me, and suddenly I realized that they were doing this for me, and I felt the rage swell up uncontrollably within me like some violent chemical reaction until I was delirious with hatred. They were waiting for me. ‘Irving to provoke me. I wanted more than anything in the world to inflict some unspeakably painful punishment on them.

Alice stirred. I managed somehow to make myself understand that there was nothing I could do. Her mouth opened. Jenkins made a sign, and suddenly the stretcher was in the ambulance, the doors slammed shut, and the ambulance moved off. Gone. (If I had had my gun, Jenkins, I would have shot you then.) Jenkins turned indifferently and walked over to another man, who appeared to be some sort of police official. Jenkins began speaking, too softly for me to hear, but he seemed to be indicating the police cars with a dismissive movement of his hand. The other man answered animatedly.

“Look, we’ll do whatever you want. We’ve got plenty of other things to do. But whoever you guys are after is still in that building.
No one
came out through that window.”

Jenkins said something in reply and, turning away, walked over to where Tyler was still crouched over the pavement. I could not hear either of them, but I saw Tyler nod and point toward the place where I had crossed between two parked cars into the street.

It suddenly struck me that I must still be leaving a trail of blood. I knelt down and felt the street at my feet. There was a pool of thick, sticky liquid all around me. I moved my hands up my body. There was blood running down my legs and soaking through my torn trousers. I tried to determine where it was coming from, but now there was blood all over my hands and everything felt sticky.

Run.

I raced down the avenue, past policemen and police cars and onlookers, and then turned west, still staying in the middle of the street as much as I could. I imagined that I was leaving a clear track of blood for them to follow, and I wanted it obliterated by the traffic and the sun. I pulled up several blocks later, realizing that that was a ridiculous idea and worrying that by running I was only making myself lose blood faster.

Walking now, I arrived at my apartment on Ninety-second Street several minutes later. I walked past it up to the next corner and then back again. No sign of anything unusual. I climbed up the outside stairs and, leaning out over the railing, pushed the old buzzer button next to my door underneath. I heard with relief the little click. They had not found this place. I waited several minutes to be sure. No sound or movement anywhere. I went back down the stairs and around to my entrance, pushing the button once more, to hear the reassuring click again.

Inside I found everything undisturbed. I went into the bathroom and stripped off my clothes. The trousers were torn and would have to be patched and resewn, but it was my body I was worried about now. I stood under the shower for less than a minute and then carefully dried myself all over. Then, beginning with the scalp and working down, I explored every inch of my body with my fingertips. I am used to inspecting myself this way, because every time I stumble badly or crash into some sharp object, I have to check laboriously that there is not some unseen fracture or cut. But usually I am only checking one part of my body, whereas now I had to go over every bit of it to make sure that my life was not bleeding away out of some gash or bullet wound.

Everything was all right until I got to my calves, but there my fingers encountered the moist, thick stickiness of open wounds. I ran the shower over them again and blotted them dry with the towel. I could feel the blood well up immediately and begin running down the outsides of my legs again. It is almost impossible to tell by touch how serious wounds are, but I decided that I had one bad horizontal gash on my left calf and two on the right.

I got out the first-aid kit that I had carried away from MicroMagnetics and found a roll of adhesive tape and some gauze. I hated to use it up; normally, I would have used visible bandaging and stayed out of sight until I had healed, but I was in a hurry now. I had to get moving. I cut a series of strips from the roll of tape and laid them out in a row along the edge of the bathtub, where they would be ready when I needed them. Then I cut off a large hunk of gauze, folded it to what seemed like the right size, and laid it over the first wound. I quickly applied the adhesive strips, using them to pull the wound together and fasten the gauze in place. I used too much tape and too much gauze, but I had to be sure to contain the bleeding so that I could go out.

When I had finished bandaging both legs, I propped them up on a chair and waited almost an hour, to make sure the wounds were closing. I would have to walk to midtown and I was afraid of pulling them open again. I put on fresh clothes and, slipping my gun into my pocket, set out walking carefully down Madison Avenue. In the sixties, I stopped to use a pay phone.

“I have a collect call for anyone from Mr. Halloway. Will you accept the charges?”

“Of course,” said Jenkins in his most unctuous, sincere voice. “How are you, Nick?”

“I’m fine. I mainly called to let you know that. I thought you might be concerned.”

“That seems an imprudent thing for you to do. Unless you need help. Or unless there was something you wanted to find out from me.”

That wasn’t the way Jenkins talked. He was trying to provoke me into losing control. But I was already so angry that nothing he said could have affected me.

“Why did you take Alice, Jenkins?”

“She’ll be safer with us. And of course we’ll want to talk to her.”

“Jenkins, she knows nothing that will help you. Nothing. I was very careful about that.”

“I’m not surprised. You’re almost always very careful when you can afford to be. But we’re concerned about you. Are you sure you weren’t hurt by the gunfire or the broken glass? If you’re bleeding, you should have medical—”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“We’re going to talk to her. And we’re going to make sure that she’s safe. We’ll be looking after her.”

“What do you mean, you’ll be looking after her? She doesn’t know anything. You can let her go right now.”

“Nick, I don’t doubt you when you say you didn’t tell her anything. I know you. In fact, I’ll tell you something: if you’d told her the truth about yourself, we might not have found you so quickly.”

“How did you find me? Did Alice tell someone about me?”

“Take a look in any bookstore. You brought this on yourself. You have to learn to trust people, Nick. As for Alice, she may know more than she realizes. And it can sometimes take us a while in these situations to be sure that someone has been perfectly frank with us. In any case, she’ll be safer here with us until we have you. Then, of course, there would be no reason—”

“Now I’ll tell
you
something, Jenkins. If I could trust you, I’d make the trade: me for Alice. But as you point out, I’m not good at trusting people. Just as you’re not much good at inspiring trust.”

I hung up. The conversation was exactly what I had expected, and they had had plenty of time to trace the call.

Had Alice given me away? I tried to make sense of what Jenkins had said about looking in a bookstore. I walked into the next one I came to, simply pushing the door open, not much caring at this point if anyone noticed. I saw it almost right away. It was some sort of romance.
White Lies,
by D. P. Gengler. It must have been quite popular, because there were several stacks of copies, with one copy propped upright on top so that you could see the cover. It was actually Alice that I recognized first, although she had drawn herself with her face turned away, swooning in the arms of an elegant but rather untrustworthy-looking man in a dinner jacket. I could see that it was an excellent likeness of me, one that Jenkins or any of his men would recognize immediately. On the back flap of the jacket were the words “Jacket illustration by Alice Barlow.”